A Student Project to Qualify Underprivileged Adolescents

The objective of this student project was for the students to develop, conduct, and supervise a training course for basic work place applications (word processing and business graphics). Stu-dents were responsible for the planning, organizing and the teaching of the course. As participants, underprivileged adolescents took part in order to learn the handling of IT applica-tions and therefore, improve their job skills and have a better chance to get into employment. Therefore the adolescents do the role of trainees at the course. Our students worked with a popu-lation that is continually overlooked by the field. As a result, the students trained to design and implement training courses, exercised to manage projects and increased their social responsibility and awareness concerning the way of life and living conditions of other young people. The underprivileged adolescents learned to use important business applications and increased their job skills and job chances. The overall design of our concept required extensive resources to supervise and to steer the students and the adolescents. The lecturers had to teach and to counsel the students and had to be on “stand-by ” just in case they were needed to solve critical situations between the two groups of young people